I don't know how, but somehow I missed this a long time ago - I made a parallel translation of "Der Erlkönig" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe which I did in April last year. I also found some free audio of it. Here they are:
My own loose parallel translation
The audio on youtube
To get the audio as an mp3, I just use RealPlayer. It has a plugin that lets you download streamed videos from youtube and you can then extract the mp3. Easy :-)
I didn't put much effort into the translation so don't base your exam preparation on my vocabulary choices! Comment below if you find any issues.
My preparations for what I plan to do in trying to achieve the C2 level exam by the start of next year have not really got started very well. I know I really need to speak German every day, but that certainly hasn't happened yet and the year is almost 1 month down. I have a few plans of attack on this problem which I will discuss more in my future posts.
I'm currently reading a new German book after reading one of the several books in English which I got for my birthday and Christmas (both around the same time). This book was lent to me by my Austrian friend at work. Called das größere Wunder, it is written by an Austrian author but set all over the world. I've had it for a couple of weeks and am about 10% of the way through it. I'll try to pick up the pace a bit! I'll write some more thoughts about it soon as it was a bit of a shock to me in some ways and a great test for my current abilities helping to show me the way to some improvements.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
The piano speaks!
An interesting little video article in German about an art display that shows that a mechanically-played piano but sound like it's speaking, sort of:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4
The kid they based it on seems to have a funny accent or a minor speech impediment, which surely doesn't help the comprehensibility of the final result. To train your understanding, ignore/close the onscreen translations as they appear.
Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCPjK4nGY4
The kid they based it on seems to have a funny accent or a minor speech impediment, which surely doesn't help the comprehensibility of the final result. To train your understanding, ignore/close the onscreen translations as they appear.
Enjoy!
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Examples of the spoken section (Mündlicher Teil) of various Goethe-Zertifikat test levels
Just a short one to share some links I found recently of examples of candidates sitting various levels of the Goethe Zertifikat exams. The exams are probably pretty similar for TestDaF, so these should be a good guide. As I found while I was preparing for the B2 exam, there are no examples available for the B2 or C1 exams. I wrote to Goethe at the time and they just basically replied to say "there's no such thing available". Basically, they were just fobbing me off :-) So please, if you're preparing for either of those exams, or even just if you're curious to see what those levels look like when done well, write to Goethe and request that they make more recordings available. Maybe we can start a groundswell :-)
Anyway, without further ado, here are the examples I've found for the various levels:
A1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGNd-6pDkEI
A2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o87rLPbbHc
B1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khf1PF-jsHY
B2: MISSING!
C1: MISSING!
C2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8VN2keDjzk
There's also this video for B1 level that's an example of the kind of introductions you need to be able to do at that level.
What I noticed is that A1 is not a complete doddle but it's clearly very formulaic. It would probably be fairly easy to pass it with just a bit of drilling for the exam itself. Although that may not be the best Einführung into the German language, it would make the task of passing the exam easier if that's all you want to do.
Tschau for now!
Anyway, without further ado, here are the examples I've found for the various levels:
A1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGNd-6pDkEI
A2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o87rLPbbHc
B1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khf1PF-jsHY
B2: MISSING!
C1: MISSING!
C2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8VN2keDjzk
There's also this video for B1 level that's an example of the kind of introductions you need to be able to do at that level.
What I noticed is that A1 is not a complete doddle but it's clearly very formulaic. It would probably be fairly easy to pass it with just a bit of drilling for the exam itself. Although that may not be the best Einführung into the German language, it would make the task of passing the exam easier if that's all you want to do.
Tschau for now!
Monday, January 6, 2014
Extract from DRadio Wissen's Lernen to Talk Show episode
I wrote a post about an interesting discovery called "The Lernen to Talk Show" way back last year (so, a few weeks ago). It's a youtube show created by +Mickey Mangan . All the background is explained or linked there. The main thing I wanted to talk about today is that, contrary to my better judgement, I did actually end up transcribing a section of an interview Mickey did on DRadio Wissen about a year after he had finished up his year in Germany which was the main content of his web show.
I felt compelled to do so because I found the comments by one of the interviewees, Dr Martina Pinke, to be a little unreasonable. As I wrote in my earlier post, she basically says that if you are 30, you can't really learn a language. She does admit that Mickey himself speaks very good German, but she confuses the issues if you ask me. From my impression of what she says, basically you will never really "speak" a language unless you are essentially flawless with a native accent. Before I comment further, please listen to the interview from when it has about 45:45 mins remaining until about 42 mins remaining. It was enough work just to transcribe this 3.5 mins - sorry, but I ain't doing the whole hour!
Then you can read my transcription and parallel translation here:
Transcription and Parallel Translation
I don't disagree with everything she says. In fact, perhaps what she says about becoming accent-free is true. I know it has been researched but I think it's quite hard to replicate the conditions children learn under in comparison to their parents. I think a lot of the differences might be due to the differences in a child's willingness to immerse themselves (unconsciously) in their new language in comparison to adults. Think about adults moving to a new country with their children. The children go to school and want to do everything they can to fit in with those around them. Peer pressure is never so strong as when you're a child or teenager. We adults see these things more sanguinely. Conformity with those around us is something we care less and less about as we age. However, to get to a higher level in language learning we need to be willing to conform again. We need to conform more to the "standard" accent (which we have to search out because we probably won't be picking up a local native accent from our peers) and we need to conform our phrasing, even our body language and world view, in order to fit in.
Then there's a difference in time available. Children are forcibly immersed by their parents in their new community but their parents will usually just to do enough to get by in their new homeland and then relax with their family, friends and language-speaking community. If you're not married with children then perhaps you can't visualise this very well, but you really just don't have time to "live" the language 24/7. That is, unless your partner wants to do the same and your circle of friends speaks the local language. Some of this is a choice, and some of it is forced upon us.
All I'm saying is that the circumstances for children are vastly different to those for adults.
In terms of accent, some adult learners achieve a much better accent than others. What are the differences? Well, perhaps the other factors she mentions are also as important - input and motivation. She forgot to mention practice, since speaking is a physical task that is improved with constantly exercising the required muscles and coordinating them so that producing the right sounds will literally "just roll off the tongue". While a child is more plastic in terms of accent, etc, an adult can achieve this if they want to. Perhaps one problem is that once an adult achieves a pretty good accent they don't keep torturing themselves to keep getting more and more perfect as their place in society, and how well accepted they are, etc, are already more settled. Children and teenagers are desperate to fit in, and different accents are often mercilessly teased out of youngsters by others. It's not for nothing that we say "kids can be so cruel"!
I've never been very good with producing accents or hearing small differences, which is partially why I've decided to read an introductory book on phonetics. I just recently ordered "A Practical Introduction to Phonetics" by Catford which I hope will help me learn how to recognise and produce the sounds of any language I learn much more accurately. For this year, I hope it will help me with German, of course :-) If I were just a good listener I wouldn't need this, but I found when learning Chinese that I couldn't tell the difference between the consonant sounds represented in Pinyin as "xi" vs "shi" (although those always had a vowel differences to cover up my mistakes :-) ), "qi" vs "chi" and "ji" vs "zhi". Then I found an old book in a university library called "Mandarin Pronunciation" by Raymond Huang (unfortunately out of print) which explains the pronunciation of every single vowel and consonant of Chinese with a diagram showing the position of elements in the mouth and a short descriptive text. Even though I had listened to a fair bit of Chinese I had always been unable to accurately produce a difference between those consonants above in a way that would make sense to Chinese speakers, but after reading the descriptions for just those sounds in the book I found that the few short phrases I tried out got a very enthusiastic reception - much more than ever before! In fact, the team member who judged my accent most harshly actually got very excited and said that it sounded really good, "very standard". So, perhaps as an adult who never had a particularly good ear, this is what I really need to improve my accent. Obviously, producing the sound in one off, concentrated speech is one thing. For German I want to sound much more standard in normal speech. I think my vowels in particular need work, along with the few consonants that are significantly different to English, so we'll see if the book helps. I plan on writing a little more on this topic in the future as I recently learnt something interesting about German pronunciation which I'd like to share, but I digress.
But back to the transcription of the interview with Dr. Penke. I feel as though she might have taken a little offence that Mickey suggested that wanting to learn the language and having fun with it are all you need, even though she says something similar herself in different words. She says you also need "motivation" and "input", and having fun in the language is a great way to get input!
She then goes on to say that you can only really ever learn the language if you're a first-language learner (i.e., you learn it in childhood). Well, what's the metric? She admits that Mickey speaks really good German but that he's immediately recognisable as a non-native speaker, and then she finishes with what I consider to be a massive clanger:
"A: Can anyone manage to learn a language within one year?
B: When… Yes, they could manage it – as a child! Obviously, error-free. Start early!"
Apart from being completely useless advise to adult language learners, it's also complete nonsense. The best a child can hope for is to learn the language roughly to the level of their peers in a year. What Mickey and other adult learners have to do is to try to learn the language to sound like ADULTS in the language. Adults are not forgiven their errors, they have very large vocabularies and can (depending on the person involved) have very detailed conversations. My eldest daughter is 3 years old and I think she's brilliant, but I can tell you that she's only learnt English to the level of a small child (I think a 4 or 5 year old, but I'm biased). I often speak to my young nephews and nieces and note that even 8 year olds are still making very obvious mistakes. And I'm not talking about the very obvious "mistakes" that their parents make in terms of using a different dialect, I mean mistakes as in things that adults don't say but children and language learners say, like using the wrong tense, or the wrong form for an irregular past tense, etc. This is after 8 years of immersion, including three years of immersion *in school*!
No, children do not learn a language flawlessly within a year. We just have lower standards for them, which they reach faster, because the last "10%" is what takes all the time...
I felt compelled to do so because I found the comments by one of the interviewees, Dr Martina Pinke, to be a little unreasonable. As I wrote in my earlier post, she basically says that if you are 30, you can't really learn a language. She does admit that Mickey himself speaks very good German, but she confuses the issues if you ask me. From my impression of what she says, basically you will never really "speak" a language unless you are essentially flawless with a native accent. Before I comment further, please listen to the interview from when it has about 45:45 mins remaining until about 42 mins remaining. It was enough work just to transcribe this 3.5 mins - sorry, but I ain't doing the whole hour!
Then you can read my transcription and parallel translation here:
Transcription and Parallel Translation
I don't disagree with everything she says. In fact, perhaps what she says about becoming accent-free is true. I know it has been researched but I think it's quite hard to replicate the conditions children learn under in comparison to their parents. I think a lot of the differences might be due to the differences in a child's willingness to immerse themselves (unconsciously) in their new language in comparison to adults. Think about adults moving to a new country with their children. The children go to school and want to do everything they can to fit in with those around them. Peer pressure is never so strong as when you're a child or teenager. We adults see these things more sanguinely. Conformity with those around us is something we care less and less about as we age. However, to get to a higher level in language learning we need to be willing to conform again. We need to conform more to the "standard" accent (which we have to search out because we probably won't be picking up a local native accent from our peers) and we need to conform our phrasing, even our body language and world view, in order to fit in.
Then there's a difference in time available. Children are forcibly immersed by their parents in their new community but their parents will usually just to do enough to get by in their new homeland and then relax with their family, friends and language-speaking community. If you're not married with children then perhaps you can't visualise this very well, but you really just don't have time to "live" the language 24/7. That is, unless your partner wants to do the same and your circle of friends speaks the local language. Some of this is a choice, and some of it is forced upon us.
All I'm saying is that the circumstances for children are vastly different to those for adults.
In terms of accent, some adult learners achieve a much better accent than others. What are the differences? Well, perhaps the other factors she mentions are also as important - input and motivation. She forgot to mention practice, since speaking is a physical task that is improved with constantly exercising the required muscles and coordinating them so that producing the right sounds will literally "just roll off the tongue". While a child is more plastic in terms of accent, etc, an adult can achieve this if they want to. Perhaps one problem is that once an adult achieves a pretty good accent they don't keep torturing themselves to keep getting more and more perfect as their place in society, and how well accepted they are, etc, are already more settled. Children and teenagers are desperate to fit in, and different accents are often mercilessly teased out of youngsters by others. It's not for nothing that we say "kids can be so cruel"!
I've never been very good with producing accents or hearing small differences, which is partially why I've decided to read an introductory book on phonetics. I just recently ordered "A Practical Introduction to Phonetics" by Catford which I hope will help me learn how to recognise and produce the sounds of any language I learn much more accurately. For this year, I hope it will help me with German, of course :-) If I were just a good listener I wouldn't need this, but I found when learning Chinese that I couldn't tell the difference between the consonant sounds represented in Pinyin as "xi" vs "shi" (although those always had a vowel differences to cover up my mistakes :-) ), "qi" vs "chi" and "ji" vs "zhi". Then I found an old book in a university library called "Mandarin Pronunciation" by Raymond Huang (unfortunately out of print) which explains the pronunciation of every single vowel and consonant of Chinese with a diagram showing the position of elements in the mouth and a short descriptive text. Even though I had listened to a fair bit of Chinese I had always been unable to accurately produce a difference between those consonants above in a way that would make sense to Chinese speakers, but after reading the descriptions for just those sounds in the book I found that the few short phrases I tried out got a very enthusiastic reception - much more than ever before! In fact, the team member who judged my accent most harshly actually got very excited and said that it sounded really good, "very standard". So, perhaps as an adult who never had a particularly good ear, this is what I really need to improve my accent. Obviously, producing the sound in one off, concentrated speech is one thing. For German I want to sound much more standard in normal speech. I think my vowels in particular need work, along with the few consonants that are significantly different to English, so we'll see if the book helps. I plan on writing a little more on this topic in the future as I recently learnt something interesting about German pronunciation which I'd like to share, but I digress.
But back to the transcription of the interview with Dr. Penke. I feel as though she might have taken a little offence that Mickey suggested that wanting to learn the language and having fun with it are all you need, even though she says something similar herself in different words. She says you also need "motivation" and "input", and having fun in the language is a great way to get input!
She then goes on to say that you can only really ever learn the language if you're a first-language learner (i.e., you learn it in childhood). Well, what's the metric? She admits that Mickey speaks really good German but that he's immediately recognisable as a non-native speaker, and then she finishes with what I consider to be a massive clanger:
"A: Can anyone manage to learn a language within one year?
B: When… Yes, they could manage it – as a child! Obviously, error-free. Start early!"
Apart from being completely useless advise to adult language learners, it's also complete nonsense. The best a child can hope for is to learn the language roughly to the level of their peers in a year. What Mickey and other adult learners have to do is to try to learn the language to sound like ADULTS in the language. Adults are not forgiven their errors, they have very large vocabularies and can (depending on the person involved) have very detailed conversations. My eldest daughter is 3 years old and I think she's brilliant, but I can tell you that she's only learnt English to the level of a small child (I think a 4 or 5 year old, but I'm biased). I often speak to my young nephews and nieces and note that even 8 year olds are still making very obvious mistakes. And I'm not talking about the very obvious "mistakes" that their parents make in terms of using a different dialect, I mean mistakes as in things that adults don't say but children and language learners say, like using the wrong tense, or the wrong form for an irregular past tense, etc. This is after 8 years of immersion, including three years of immersion *in school*!
No, children do not learn a language flawlessly within a year. We just have lower standards for them, which they reach faster, because the last "10%" is what takes all the time...
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